Mutant Chronicles

by Matt Forbeck

  Mitch and Samuel led the team into the room, working their way over the fallen rubble. “The city of the ancients,” Samuel said. “Buried five hundred years ago in the Black Winter.”

  “Holy shit,” Duval said.

  Steiner padded after them, bringing up the rear. “We’re being watched,” he said.

  Mitch knew that but didn’t see what they could do about it. Their only choice was to move forward as fast as possible and hope that whatever was hunting them wouldn’t keep up.

  The room’s vaulted ceiling rose high over their heads, exposing three full floors of the building before them. The glass that had once filled the panels of the building’s skin had long since been shattered and knocked away, and ancient, faded graffiti covered much of what was left.

  Mitch stared at the scrawls and picked out the faces of mutants, demons, and things far worse: creatures made of stacked muscles torn from their victims, others with skin made of jagged razors. Images of blood covered everything, and Mitch could not tell if the red came from paint or was real.

  There seemed to be five different sections, each dedicated to a different sort of depravity. He picked out words, names: Ilian, Semai, Demnogornis, Muawijhe, Algeroth.

  The last name appeared over the row of empty windows set at ground level next to an illustration of a massive beast with horns jutting from its insane head in three different directions. The eyes of the artwork seemed to glow with hate and followed Mitch no matter where he moved in the room.

  Below the demonic creature someone had used blood to paint a crude sign in Latin. It read, RELINQUES TOTUS SPEC FORNICATORES MATRIS.

  “Brother,” Mitch said, trying to keep his voice steady. “What’s it say?”

  Brother Samuel looked more determined than ever as he translated the words aloud. “Abandon all hope.”

  He paused for a moment.

  “Motherfuckers.”

  Behind them, El Jesus gasped, stunned. “No shit.”

  39

  As the soldiers gaped at the skyscraper’s violated facade, the sounds of stones scraping reverberated down the tunnel behind them. Each of them crouched at the ready, their weapons pointed back the way they’d come.

  They stayed that way for a long moment, but nothing happened. Nothing came charging at them out of the darkness, howling for their blood. No mutants, no demons, nothing. Not even another sound from the tunnel’s depths.

  Mitch knew one thing for certain, though. That sound hadn’t happened by itself. Someone had made it.

  Steiner was right. They were being followed.

  “Fuck,” El Jesus said, summing it up.

  Samuel pulled out the Book of Law to consult the Chronicles. Mitch leaned over the monk’s shoulder and saw an engraving on one page that depicted the skyscraper’s facade exactly. Someone had drawn an arrow that pointed into the dark maw of the lowest bank of shattered windows. Samuel tapped it with a thick finger. That was where they had to go.

  Duval took point this time, her rifle at the ready. She moved like a lioness, heading for the window and the hallway of stone and steel beyond. The others followed close behind her. In those tight quarters, they would have to worry less about being clumped together and more about being separated and picked off.

  As Mitch and the others joined Duval in the building, she played her flashlight around the interior. On one surface opposite the windows, the bright beam revealed the golden shapes of demons carved in bas-relief. They looked like half-buried fossils emerging from the facade.

  “What are these?” she whispered.

  Samuel moved close and examined the shapes, almost brushing his fingers across them. Mitch half expected them to leap off the wall and try to strangle the monk, but they stayed there, trapped in the wall.

  “I have no idea,” the monk whispered back.

  Juba pointed the team down a long hallway and signaled that they would eventually need to keep going down. Duval led them into it. They moved in single file, each of them ready to snap into action at the barest sound.

  At the end of the hall, Duval entered a room and moved to the side, covering the others and letting them push in after her. The walls were covered with ornate carvings and gold trim that had long since tarnished with the grime of untold centuries. In the wall opposite the entrance stood a set of rusted elevator doors.

  Juba stepped up and pressed the down button to call the elevator car. It crumbled to dust at his touch. He looked over his shoulder to see El Jesus gaping at him. In response, he just shrugged.

  The time for the subtle approach was over, Mitch decided. Whoever was following them knew they were there. If they stayed there too long, their pursuers would eventually decide to attack. Better to move along before that happened.

  Mitch stepped up and gave a vicious kick to the center of the elevator doors. The bulk of them disintegrated into rust-colored dust on contact, and the few remaining shards tipped over into the shaft beyond.

  An elevator car hung there, stuck between floors, caught halfway down to their floor. Mitch grabbed the edge of the car’s floor and gave it a good tug. It held.

  Satisfied that he wouldn’t be cut in half, Mitch knelt down and poked his head into the shaft beneath the car. There was plenty of room for them to slip underneath it, even Steiner, who still carried the bomb on his back.

  A rusty cable snaked down past the car, disappearing in the darkness below. Mitch spit into the shaft but never heard it hit.

  Mitch pulled himself back into the room and nodded at the others. Severian handed each of them a winch they could attach to their combat harnesses and to the cable. Mitch had used one of them before and suspected the others had as well—except Brother Samuel—as it came with most megacorps’ basic training. With it, they could control their rate of descent and even winch themselves back upward in a pinch.

  The trick to all this, of course, was making sure no one dropped the elevator car or anything else on top of them as they slipped down the shaft. While on the cable, they’d be easy targets with nowhere to go.

  “We don’t want them coming down on top of us,” Mitch said. The other soldiers were professionals. They knew a call for a volunteer when they heard it.

  “I got it,” Juba said.

  It was a dangerous assignment, everyone in the room knew, but Juba seemed to have a good handle on it. He walked up to the shaft and tried to pry the elevator’s inner doors open with his bare hands. Normally, he might have been able to manage it, but the rust made it nearly impossible.

  El Jesus came over to give him a hand. They each took one of the pair of sliding doors in their hands and, on the count of three, pulled.

  The doors groaned open, loud like a scream. Everyone winced at the sound, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Juba tossed his pack inside the elevator car, then hauled himself into it. The car juddered for a moment, shaking with the Mishiman’s weight. Mitch heard him hold his breath. Hell, everyone else did too. They only let it loose once the shaking stopped.

  Mitch craned his neck up to get a good look into the car. A full third of the floor was missing, a huge hole open straight down into the shaft below.

  Juba got to his knees and began to pull bits and pieces out of his pack and lay them in a row on the floor, positioned so they could not roll away. Mitch recognized the metallic parts as augmentations for the man’s rifle. Mishima always excelled at weapons customization, and Juba seemed a fine student of that art.

  From what Mitch could see, the man had a belt feed, a bipod, a water-cooled barrel, and a grenade launcher to trick out his rifle. When he was done with it, he’d have a whole new gun, one that would be perfect for blasting away at hordes of mutants from a locked position. He applauded the Mishiman’s forethought.

  El Jesus hadn’t moved from his spot since Juba had climbed up into the car. Mitch wondered if the big man thought he could pull the Mishiman out of the car if it started to fall. More likely he’d kill himself trying.

  “Not the s
afest place to be,” El Jesus said to Juba.

  Without a smile or even a glance away from his task, Juba responded. “Gotta pay for those tickets sooner or later.” He screwed the last pieces in place and finally allowed himself a ghost of a grin.

  “Verdad.”

  Juba and El Jesus hit fists.

  Once Juba was ready, Mitch leaned in under the car and secured his winch to the thick, rusty cable. He gave the clamp a good tug. Despite the rust, it held tight.

  “Brother,” Mitch said.

  The monk came over and knelt next to Mitch at the mouth of the shaft. He had an oil lantern with him to light their way. Mitch didn’t care much for relying on an open flame while entering an unknown area underground. All it would take was one loose gas main to ruin their whole day.

  Samuel looked down the shaft and swallowed hard. Mitch could tell from looking at the man that he’d never done something like this before, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him.

  Still, Mitch planned to go down before Samuel, and he didn’t want the man coming down on top of him and knocking them both to their deaths. It was time for a quick lesson.

  Mitch attached his winch and then swung his legs out over the pitch-black abyss. He tested the harness once more, then slipped off the edge and lowered himself a little way down the shaft. Severian helped Samuel get into his rig just above Mitch.

  Juba poked his head in next to him. “Jesus, that’s deep.”

  “Sixty stories,” Samuel said. He looked down at Mitch. “We’ll go first and let the others find the way.”

  “What he said,” Mitch said to Juba. He reached up and pointed at his winch. It was a simple bit of machinery, but you still had to know how it worked to not kill yourself with it.

  “All right, Brother. This is the brake. Lift it up and let yourself down. Punch it in and you stop. That’s it. Take it easy.”

  The monk reached out to thumb a small lever. “And this?”

  Mitch shouted a warning, and the monk’s hand froze.

  “That’s the quick release.” Mitch grunted. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Samuel nodded, then blew out a long breath. He wouldn’t admit it, but the words in the tunnel had shaken him. The shaft was all he’d needed to push him over the edge.

  “All right,” Mitch said. He kept his voice as calm and easy as he could, as if they were headed down to the park for a quick walk. “Let’s go.”

  Mitch put his hand on Samuel’s arm and slipped over the edge of the shaft. As he went, he pulled the monk down with him. Their winches whined, their handles spinning like mad, as the two men dropped down into the unknown.

  40

  Mitch looked up to make sure Samuel was all right. They came down at a good but controlled clip, and the monk seemed to be handling it all right.

  Light streamed in through the gated openings from the other floors into the shaft. For a moment, Mitch wondered where the light could be coming from, but he figured he might be better off not knowing—or alerting anything that might have put the lights there.

  “Twenty,” Samuel said, counting off the floors.

  Mitch groaned. “How fucking deep is this thing?” He knew Samuel had said sixty stories, but it didn’t seem possible.

  Above, as a silhouette framed in the small rectangle of light streaming in from the elevator lobby, Severian leaned into the shaft and attached her winch to the line.

  El Jesus came soon after her, then Duval, with Steiner behind her. They came down as fast as the winches would safely let them, staying a good length apart. Mitch breathed a sigh of amazement when he saw that the cable could actually hold six fully armed people, including one carrying a bomb, not to mention Juba, still stationed up in the car.

  “Ah, it’s getting hot down here,” said Mitch. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve.

  “Forty,” said the monk.

  The shaft kept going and going, with no end in sight. The lights from the sides of the shaft stopped, and they had nothing but darkness ahead.

  “Fifty-five,” Samuel said.

  A moment later the monk muttered to himself, “How far?” Then he called out, “Stop.”

  Mitch thumbed the brake on his winch gently and slowed to a stop. He hung there, suspended in the darkness. Samuel shoved his brake all the way over and came to a hard stop that shook the cable up and down its entire length. He growled in pain as his back bent over the wrong way.

  Mitch looked up at the monk. It looked like his fall might have jerked the clamp of his winch loose from the cable.

  “Sixty.”

  “We’re running out of rope here,” Mitch said.

  “We’ve gone too far,” Samuel said, his voice shaking with both effort and concern.

  Mitch tried to peer into the blackness around him and realized he could see nothing. “It’s dark. God, it’s dark.”

  “Something’s not right,” Samuel said, his voice thick with pain.

  Samuel pulled something out of his pack and put the end of it into the flame burning in his oil lamp. The flare burst into fire, emitting a dazzling light that cast the monk in a reddish hue. He dropped the flare, and it tumbled past Mitch into the darkness below.

  Mitch swung his head around to see where the flare had gone. It kept falling, tipping end over end and growing smaller and smaller until all that was left was a tiny spark in the distance.

  Mitch looked up to see Samuel’s face sag as he watched the flare keep going.

  “It can’t be,” the monk said.

  Mitch growled. “Got anything in that damned book?”

  “What have I missed?”

  Mitch gritted his teeth as Samuel pulled his leather-bound book from where he’d tucked it over his heart, inside his robes. He fumbled with the book and nearly dropped it as he brought his lamp up high enough to read by its light. He flipped through the pages with frantic speed, looking for a passage to provide them guidance.

  From far above, Mitch could hear the others talking.

  “Don’t fall behind, Steiner,” Duval said. “It’s a long way down.

  “Yeah,” Steiner said, “all the way to hell.”

  The cable started to vibrate in Mitch’s hand, and he looked up past Samuel to see Severian and the others on their way.

  Then he heard something shuffling in the darkness below him. He couldn’t tell how far away it might be. He only hoped it didn’t know he was there.

  “Weird sounds down here, pal.” He did his best to keep his voice calm despite the fact that he wanted to reach up and rip the book out of the man’s hands. This was not a library, and they needed to get out of the shaft as fast as they could.

  Samuel ignored Mitch entirely, concentrating on the book. “It has to be here. Fifty-five, sixty floors down. There should be a ledge. It says so right here. It has to be.”

  The cable started to shake harder and faster as the others drew closer. The sympathetic vibrations knocked Samuel’s winch again and again until it finally popped free.

  Mitch didn’t even have time to curse as the monk tumbled past him. His hand darted out and grabbed the book by the binding, right around the place at which the chain was anchored to it.

  As Samuel fell, the chain snapped taut, and the monk’s sudden weight threatened to rip Mitch’s arm from its socket. Worse yet, the winch meant to hold Mitch to the rusty cable—one fully armed man—now held two. It groaned loudly over Mitch’s head, and he knew it would only be seconds before its clamp’s grip gave up, just as Samuel’s winch had.

  “Do not let me fall,” Samuel said, his voice straining with pain. The shackle from the book’s chain cut into his flesh, even as it kept him from falling to his doom.

  “Brother,” Mitch said as he tried to keep hold of the man swaying below him, “I’m trying.”

  Mitch could feel the links on the chain start to stretch and give way. The chain had been forged to hold a book to a man, not a man to a book.

  Mitch tried to pull the monk up. He reach
ed for him with his other hand in a desperate attempt to reach him before the chain broke. Doing that and keeping his balance on the winch proved nearly impossible, but he meant to try.

  He leaned back as far as he could, and Samuel reached up for his hand. They were still more than a good foot apart when the chain snapped and the monk tumbled into the darkness.

  41

  Mitch started to shout in protest, but he never had a decent chance. Just as he was about to curse the monk, the chain, the cable, and everything else in the whole damned world, Brother Samuel stopped falling.

  The bottom of the lift shaft ended up being right below them, just out of sight. About half of the floor had collapsed, though, into what seemed like a bottomless pit. When Samuel had thrown the flare, it had gone straight into the pit, but when he’d fallen he had landed on the part of the floor that was still there.

  Lying on his back, bruised and aching but alive, Samuel looked up at Mitch in stunned silence. Then the monk threw back his head and laughed. Mitch was so relieved, he couldn’t help joining in.

  “Brother,” Mitch said, wiping the tears from his eyes, “you are one lucky son of a bitch.”

  Samuel sat up and recovered his lantern. “God provides, Sergeant,” he said as he got to his feet. “God provides.”

  He was going to say more but cut himself off when the light from his lamp fell on a mutant standing right next to him on the ledge. His tongue froze in his mouth as he tried to twist away from the creature lunging at him, slashing with its boneblade.

  He was a hair too slow. The blade sliced through his robes and cut into his side. It glanced off his ribs, though, rather than cutting through them.

  Mitch thumbed over the quick-release lever on his winch. He slid straight down the rope and landed on the mutant, smashing it to the ground. Unfazed, it struggled like mad, trying to throw him off.

  Mitch pumped two rounds from his pistol right into the thing’s chest, but he might as well have kissed it. It snarled and twisted under his feet, tossing Mitch toward the nearest wall.